


Oceans of ink

by Willowbarb



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 20:40:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18836374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willowbarb/pseuds/Willowbarb
Summary: It is always the poor who suffer whilst the nobles play their games...





	Oceans of ink

“Have you ever been in a city under siege? Maybe this part's not in your books. See, it's not the fighting kills most people. It's the starving. Food's worth more than gold. Noble ladies sell their diamonds for a sack of potatoes. Things get bad enough, the poor start eating each other. The thieves? They love a siege. Soon as the gates are sealed, they steal all the food. By the time it's all over, they're the richest men in town."

Not all battles are fought with fire and blood; some involve quills and oceans of ink. In the long years to come historians, both in Westeros and the wider world, fought unceasingly about Tyrion Lannister’s campaign to take the Iron Throne. His defenders, who, on the whole, had patrons who felt that a siege starving a city to the point where the poor either died of hunger or became cannibals was perfectly acceptable, whereas killing them outright by blood and fire was shockingly reprehensible, claimed that he had simply made a series of unfortunate mistakes which cumulatively left Daenerys Targaryen traumatised beyond the possibility of recovery, and thus unfit to rule. 

Tyrion’s detractors noted that, even if the long list of his very obviously poor decisions were genuine mistakes, which they strongly doubted, no sane individual, much less her younger brother, could have imagined that Cersei would have been content to remain in exile in Pentos, with or without her twin Jaime. 

Had Tyrion succeeded in freeing his siblings to escape to Pentos the inevitable consequences included yet more of the wars he professed to abhor, as Cersei launched her campaign to recover the throne she regarded as hers; the more cynical chroniclers noted that the deaths of Cersei and Jaime together below the Red Keep left Tyrion conveniently not only the last Lannister standing but one with a marriage bond to the North. 

The cynics at the time included Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, waiting to see whether this Lannister would pay his debts; he had never been enamoured of Tyrion’s self righteousness, nor of his fantasies about what actually happens in a besieged City, but Highgarden was a tempting prize. Whether Tyrion would give it up was another matter, which is why Ser Bronn slept with the crossbow Tyrion had used to murder his father close at hand.

Like all such speculation it was impossible to prove one way or another, though the implications for the man named Jon Snow proved a heavy burden; after all, if one Targaryen had burned a city to the ground then what faith could be placed in her nephew not to do the same thing? The fact that Jon Snow was a friend of Davos Seaworth was less than helpful since his ability to judge character was plainly defective; the last person Davos had supported for the Iron Throne, Stannis Baratheon, had burnt his daughter alive as a ritual sacrifice to put him on that throne. It hadn’t worked.

And, just to make matters worse, there was the fact that it had been Davos who, at Tyrion’s request, set up the escape route for Cersei. Even a retired smuggler with notoriously poor judgement of character would have had difficulty in persuading anyone that he believed Cersei would miraculously become a model of domestic bliss once she reached Pentos, to live out a quiet life raising her last child. She would have returned to Westeros with all the fire and blood she could muster, and the poor who had survived her destruction of the Sept, and the destruction wreaked by Daenerys, would have died in Cersei’s new war.

The ravens which carried news across Westeros and onwards reported an inconvenient truth; the army of the north had raped and pillaged alongside the Dothraki and the Unsullied in Kingslanding. 

Fortunately, from the perspective of the Starks at any rate, their name was not attached to it; the sins of a bastard Snow or a Targaryen could and would be disowned if it came to keeping the pack safe. Sansa Stark knew the value of plausible deniability, just as she knew every other ruse which Littlefinger had taught her. Historians questioned the extent to which Sansa Stark had intended to use her sister Arya as her pet assassin, just as they questioned whether the Free Folk had been allowed to retain their freedom once they had served their purpose, since masterless men have always struck fear into the hearts of masters. Naturally their conclusions differed, largely depending on their patron’s perspectives. After all, the poor end up eating the poor...


End file.
